


Transfusions

by Tabata



Series: Leoverse [58]
Category: Glee
Genre: M/M, Multiverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 21:42:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29107266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata
Summary: Pete, our multiverse's personal timelord, looks back at his life as a Keeper and at an even in particular, a mysterious mechanics that saved his tree-universe from collapsing to its death.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Series: Leoverse [58]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/30541
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	Transfusions

**Author's Note:**

> If you have read one or more of the Leoverse stories, you know that they're either what ifs or a AUs of our canon. What you might not know is that they are all part of a bigger multiverse. Pete, who has already been a character of a few stories here and there, is actually a Keeper (i.e. sort of timelord) in charge of mantaining the multiverse alive. Here we explain you how.
> 
> Esploratori del Polyverso (Chapter 2, Mission 2)  
> prompt: The story should have: a mystery, a male protagonist, a queer character, and it should be written in the past tense.

Orbit 3,567

That was a weird day.

Not that the previous 3,566 had been any normal at all, for the records. But that one was a truly befuddling one and I've seen very few like that in the years that followed. The universe woke up at 5:30 with a strong shudder, indicating quite a bumpy night (cfr. Paragraph 72/c – II.IV of entry 77564307). This was not unusual in general, as tree-universes of that size tend to realign and resettle during their down time, but it was still worth investigating as Leo and Blaine's universe had suffered several setbacks due to three major unstable instances, all stemming from the same branch. Two of them I saved later on, the third could tip over and turn doomed at any moment, and for that reason I was keeping it under special surveillance.

Sun had come up on instance 32 while going down on instance 74, indicating that the axes had spun 45 degrees in two different directions. That wasn't unheard of but it was concerning. It could mean nothing or it could be the beginning of a collapsing canon-core, which wasn't advisable. I was used to not knowing exactly what caused a certain event and what consequences said event would have had because my charge had never followed any of the rules I was thought in school, nor any of the already observed patterns. As Leo would have said, my universe used to zig whenever it was supposed to zag and vice versa. For that very reason, I had taken the habit of running a system scan any time something was even remotely suspicious, and that was what I did that day too.

I used to hate system scans at the time, for two reasons. One, they took forever. This was ages before the filters were implemented, so the bigger the universe was the more time it would take. And my charge already had more than forty instances at that point. It was huge. The second reason was that I loved to personally make sure every instance was okay by watching a little bit of it. But a system scan would force me to keep everything in check through the dashboard, which I found extremely boring and still do.

I was left staring at the screen for about forty-five minutes, during which I had the time to make myself a coffee without any of the alarms setting off. A real blessing if ever there was one. But that was also a weird detail. There was so much going on in that universe – so many people doing so many things at the same time – that barely an hour passed at any given time without an event triggering one or two minor catastrophes. It was a lot of work. Having that much free time made me suspicious. I didn't know yet that tree-universes have the ability to self-regulate. They are perfectly capable of maintaining their internal general balance, that is to say not to implode, if they need to make minor but vital changes to part of themselves. In other words, they can survive on their own, they just don't want to put in the effort, and they make us do it. Cheeky bastards.

The system scan reported three new instances had been born during the night, all of them doomed. The first had lost one of the constants, Blaine. The second had lost the variable, Cody. And the third had lost Adam, who always seemed to work as a sort of stabilizer. His absence didn't always automatically translate into a doomed universe, but it created an internal instability that more often than not led to failure. The weird thing, though, was that, despite the situation, none of those instances was deteriorating.

I was already a very good Keeper – one of the best of my generation, in fact – but in all those years I hadn't acquired the necessary detachment that was needed to do what had to be done, that is resigning to the fact that sometimes the best course of action is to cut off an instance that has no hope of going anywhere. It's a matter of cost-effectiveness. What good can it do to bend over backwards to keep an instance afloat for months, maybe years, without knowing if it's going to survive or not, jeopardizing all the others in the process? It is wishful thinking at best and a good lot of recklessness in any case.

I knew other Keepers that would cut entire branches that had been there for years without so much of a thought. I couldn't even bring myself to isolate and cut a single instance that was born a couple of days before. I was convinced that every doomed instance could be reversed to non-doomed status if I could only find the right dynamic, the right detail, that special twist of narrative that would make it work. And if that was not possible, I thought I could at least give it a decency, a long enough time to develop, to end after being something. I always wanted to see how things played out. To do that, I had trained my sensibility. I had learned how to read even the smallest change, to catch deterioration at its earliest stages and, most importantly, to understand where the no-turning point was.

So, I hadn't cut off many instances, but I knew very well when one was supposed to go bad, and these ones were. Doomed universes are sickly things. They are the gaunt little boy in a Victorian novel, never dying a violent death but slowly consuming day after day. You can see the sickness taking them in the way they never run exactly right, in the way their light just doesn't shine quite as bright as the others. And the degradation always starts at the very beginning – especially with a constant and a variable that go missing – so whatever was happening was not normal and I had no clue what was going on.

Instances where Blaine was born too many years before Leo or when they didn't meet because one of them was dead or their paths simply didn't cross were not destined to survive, but they _could_ live for a time. There was still a basic structure, and the variables and constants that were supposed to be there were there, they just wouldn't work their magic. And in absence of that magic, the slow process of the instance's death would begin. This wasn't happening and it wasn't possible.

The mystery drew me in immediately.

I set myself to conduct a more thorough investigation. For the first time since I was entrusted with my tree-universe, I consciously decided to ignore most of it to focus myself on just a few instances. I pulled up their data on the screen and for a few hours I just _watched_. Since the beginning of my journey with this multiverse I had seen dragons and robots, alien planets and alien kingdoms, archers, con-artists, glorious rebels, pirates and mad criminals. There was magic everywhere, even in the most mundane places. But these three instances were dull. Common situations in a pretty much canon setting, all very plain. I had never experienced something like that with my tree-universe and I was baffled, and, yes, I admit it, bored.

I decided to check the trace they were leaving – every instance has a very unique mark, a print on the surface of space and time, something you can read and follow – hoping to find out what was so special about them, and that was when I saw that the traces were leading me outside of those three instances and towards a different instance instead.

Now, this too was, if not impossible, highly worrying. Instances are not supposed to cross each other because, when they do, the very fabric of space and time starts tearing itself apart until there's nothing dividing one universe from the other and everything comes down collapsing. It had happened a few years prior and it hadn't be pretty _at all_. I didn't feel like repeating the experience.

I instantly plugged in on this instance all the other seemed to connect to. The setting seemed to be some version of the canon, the difference was that Leo had been introduced to spirit keeping, a practice I had not known anything about 'till that moment. My boy had three pieces of jewelry and in each of them was a spirit that he could see and touch and talk with. One was Cody, one was Blaine and the third one, of course, was Adam. 

It was Cody – his usual cute, chocolate loving and sexually charged self – to explain to a very befuddled Leo and me as well that he and the others were not, in fact, part of the world I was watching a the moment. They came from elsewhere – a place where they hadn't met him – and that their purpose was and had always been being with him. It didn't take a superior mind to understand that these three spirits were, in fact, the three people who died in the other three instances. They were supposed to have their own Leo, but that didn't happen, so _somehow_ they had teamed up – three dead people from three different and supposedly separated universes – and found themselves another. It was incredible and unheard of (at least to me).

But most of all impossible.

I could say that it was the mere impossibility of it that left me staring at the screen for at least another forty-five minutes, but I'm too old now to be embarrassed (or to care for the opinion of whom will read these words). Most of it was Cody kissing Leo, making himself available to him, which happened every time, in whatever circumstances and in the most suggestive way possible. That, at least, was perfectly normal.

I watched for a while – not my proudest moment – but I retained enough decency to look away before things got too steamy. From that moment and through the six months that followed, during which I paid close attention to that universe to make sure it was really surviving in this abnormal condition, I studied.

This was not something that was explained in common books and almost literally everybody I asked to refused to believe what I said. Until one day I found a mention of something similar in an old Keeper's diary. A tiny book, almost a notepad, forgotten at the bottom of the last shelf in the library, discarded maybe. The woman had a soulmates universe like mine – which are so rare that there are very few examples in the textbooks, so that made my finding even more precious – and she was cursed with an unforgiving negative recurrent characteristic: one half of the couple would always die.

At some point or other, a lot of doomed instances were born on her tree, so many of them that she couldn't keep up with the cutting off. The universe was imbalanced to the point that it was not stable anymore. She didn't know what to do, the couple would never meet in time. Until, one day, the tree-universe started to provide. There was a person in a particular instance who had protected one of the lovers until she could met the other. The tree started to replicate this person in the new instances that were born until balance was restored.

The tree-universe had taken one element from an instance and it had found a natural way of merging it into others to _cure_ itself. Something that the Keeper couldn't have done by herself. We don't have that power.

I did much studying since then and I have discovered that this is not common at all. It takes too much power to merge elements like that, and it's too risky. Nature doesn't work that way, it's cruel in her practicality. She prefers death to a bigger loss. So, it all depends from the spirit of the tree-universe, from its life force and its will to live. In a word, it must be stubborn.

And I don't know many things, but I know one thing: mine is the most stubborn tree-universe of all.


End file.
